Book Review: Kindred

TITLE: Kindred
AUTHOR: Tammer Stein
PUBLISHED: 2011
CATEGORY: Young adult
GENRE: angels, drama
PREMISE: an angel from heaven gives premonitions to a girl while her twin brother gets missions from angels from hell.
MY REVIEW: For the sake of readers I've decided to try and add more description of books because after reading my blog a bit I realize I have the tendancy to jump right into reviews and the premises I give tend to be short. So from now on first paragraphs will be me trying to describe books to you. So Kindred is about a girl who starts getting random premonitions from an angel. She goes about trying to follow these vague visions and ends up kind of screwing up. Meanwhile her twin brother has been visited by agents of hell and he's now in their corner doing favors for them. Confliction between the two ensues because while they are now on different sides, they still love each other cause they are twins.
I admit I am still not totally sold on this angel thing. I really liked Unearthly, Fallen and Hush Hush have become guilty pleasures for me and I completely hated Halo, but for the most part I'm pretty passive on the angel business because I honestly don't get it. For the record I have not yet read Angelfire though I plan too cause it looks right up my alley. But Kindred? I really got into it. It is not a totally perfect book. Sometimes it dragged, romance came totally out of left field, and ending was slightly abrupt and a tad dissatisfying but I'm hoping that's because there's going to be a sequel in the future (please author?) also writing was random, sometimes it was good but sometimes I did an eyeroll at a bad description.
But on the whole this book is honestly what I've been wanting from the angel genre I think. For starters the author did research into angel mythology. It also goes into angel mythology from the jewish religion side of things. Yes, that's right, the jewish religion has angels too, it's not just a Christian thing. Who knew right?
It was also nice seeing a book free of the usual YA tropes. The girl has involved parents, no love triangle, slight angsting but it's kept to a minimum and is about legit worries, no whining, and no wimpy heroine falling for a bad boy who's a jerk with a heart of gold.
In short this book was refreshing. Now there is a lot of talk about faith in it but it doesn't preach to you. There even is some minor theoretical stuff in it that was rather interesting. If you don't mind stuff like this then I definitely recomend this book to you.
WHO SHOULD READ: angel book fans, those interested and not afraid of books talking about faith
MY RATING: Four out of Five angel wings